Zambia's President Mwanawasa is dead

Numerous international news sources (including the BBC here) have confirmed that Zambian President Levy Patrick Mwanawasa has died in a French hospital following prolonged convalescence from a stroke.

The news will inevitably lead to speculation about Zambia's political future and the likely impact on mining, including tax negotiations and labour legislation making its way through Parliament. We can say a few things with certainty.

1 - The constitution mandates a Presidential election within 90 days - in other words by mid-November. This will result in a completely new set of Ministers and quite likely some shifts in policy.
2 - The Patriotic Front, extremely strong in the last elections in 2006, particularly amongst mineworkers on the Copperbelt, were scheduled to hold their first ever party congress in the next few weeks. This was likely to have been an extremely rumbustuous affair.
3 - In anticipation of Mwanawasa's passing the ruling MMD and all major opposition parties (the Patriotic Front, UPND, FDD and UNIP) have been subject to increased politicking as potential candidates have jockeyed for position over the last month or so and rumours of new parties, splits, coalitions and alliances have circulated. The most significant, I think, is today's suggestion in The Post of a potential PF-UPND alliance. Given the last election results, any such configuration would likely prove tough to beat. A potential electoral transfer of power between parties would be the first since Zambia's return to multi-party politics in 1991 and would test the country's democratic institutions and culture.

In the light of point 3, it will be very interesting to see if party congresses and the election happen to the timetable above. It will also be interesting to see whether the ruling MMD's undoubted moves towards PF positions since the last election (imposing new mines taxes and starting to do something on environment, labour, sourcing and immigration) have done anything to either neutralise these issues in the election, or to weaken PF's appeal in urban settings. For the moment, everything is in the air.

An article I co-wrote with Miles Larmer on the last elections is available to download at:
http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/106/425/611